will tell
you, in answer, what you deserve and shall receive at mine.

"But I will first assume that it was knowledge of your wife's guilt
which prompted your attack on me. I am well aware that she has declared
herself innocent, and that her father supports her declaration. By the
time you receive this letter (my injuries oblige me to allow myself
a whole fortnight to write it in), I shall have taken measures which
render further concealment unnecessary. Therefore, if my confession
avail you aught, you have it here:--She is guilty: _willingly_ guilty,
remember, whatever she may say to the contrary. You may believe this,
and believe all I write hereafter. Deception between us two is at an
end.

"I have told you Margaret Sherwin is guilty. Why was she guilty? What
was the secret of my influence over her?

"To make you comprehend what I have now to communicate, it is necessary
for me to speak of myself; and of my early life. To-morrow, I will
undertake this disclosure--to-day, I can neither hold the pen, nor see
the paper any longer. If you could look at my face, where I am now laid,
you would know why!"

*****

"When we met for the first time at North Villa, I had not been five
minutes in your presence before I detected your curiosity to know
something about me, and perceived that you doubted, from the first,
whether I was born and bred for such a situation as I held under Mr.
Sherwin. Failing--as I knew you would fail--to gain any information
about me from my employer or his family, you tried, at various times,
to draw me into familiarity, to get me to talk unreservedly to you; and
only gave up the attempt to penetrate my secret, whatever it might
be, when we parted after our interview at my house on the night of the
storm. On that night, I determined to baulk your curiosity, and yet to
gain your confidence; and I succeeded. You little thought, when you
bade me farewell at my own door, that you had given your hand and your
friendship to a man, who--long before you met with Margaret Sherwin--had
inherited the right to be the enemy of your father, and of every
descendant of your father's house.

"Does this declaration surprise you? Read on, and you will understand
it.

"I am the son of a gentleman. My father's means were miserably limited,
and his family was not an old family, like yours. Nevertheless, he was a
gentleman in anybody's sense of the word; he knew it, and that knowledge
was h